Here's how Samsung plans to greatly increase storage in smartphones and other devices

There's a terrible trend of smartphones having small amounts of storage, but Samsung has announced it is working on a new system that will increase both storage capacity and speeds of the drives in smartphones. Samsung today announced that it has begun production of three-dimensional Vertical NAND flash memory, a technique that can offer twice as much storage as existing Flash dries allow.

Storage limitations can be for a variety of reasons, but scaling restrictions and fears of interference over time force manufacturers to hold back for fear of building unreliable memory. The average flash memory employed in today's devices uses a planar structure that's limited because of those restrictions. Samsung's solution is to stack multiple cell layers and create a 3D structure that offers more density. The 3D V-NAND is then 2X to 10X more reliable than the 2D floating gate structures used today. Using 3D V-NAND will also supporting write speeds that are twice as fast as before.

Samsung says that it can stack as many as 24 interconnected layers to increase capacity and speed. Jeong-Hyuk Choi, Samsung's senior vice president of Flash Product & Technology, said that the company plans to refine the structure in the future to add even more density. There's no telling when consumers can expect to see the improved memory options appear in handsets, but 3D V-NAND will eventually decrease the amount of angry letters to manufacturers about limited storage space and no microSD slot.